Short Stuff: The Brain-Bladder Connection

How much do you know about the brain-bladder connection? In about 15 minutes, it'll be a lot more. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey you, and welcome to the shorty short stuff, your
short short guy, short guys and gals. Everybody so short
because this is short stuff, including us, Josh, Chuck, Jerry,
we're all short. Are you going to make that same
similar type joke on all ladies? That's no joke, Chuck.
You know what Randy Newman said about short people what
I got no reason to live? Remember what? You don't

(00:28):
know that song? You know that that just took like
such a left turn. I was not expecting that. Shall
people got no reason? Really, man, that was a that
was a top ten hit. My friend, You're crazy when
I'm telling you, I mean, I had to be the seventies. Okay,
look it up. The only top ten hit of his
that I know is um I Love l A, we

(00:50):
love it. That's a great song. All right, So let
me ask you something. Have you ever gone home? Yes,
put and felt just all right, and I'm having a
good day. I'm home. This is great. Put the key
in the door. And as soon as you start that process,
you're like, oh m god, I have to be really

(01:11):
really bad. I cannot express to you how many times
this happens to me for real. So you have this yeah, clearly,
and I noticed that it mostly affects women. I'm like, oh,
hum whatever, Um, but I definitely have a big time,
so much so that I've trained myself because there's clearly
something going on with the brain where I'm like, oh,

(01:31):
I have so much further before I could possibly pee.
So it's not happening in the next like ten seconds
for sure, So might as well just calm down there,
bladder and it actually works. Yeah, So it is. That
is a real thing called key in lock syndrome or
urge urinary incontinence, And like you said, it apparently does
affect more women than men. And um, if you really

(01:55):
have this to a you know, to as decent to
large degree, you kind of have to plan around it.
Even Yeah, it's so I didn't understand this. Now I
totally get like those poise ads and depends ads, Like,
I get it now. Um, Apparently as as women age, uh,
they tend to become slightly more incontinent, right, But it's not,

(02:18):
like you said, it's not strictly women. Um. I think
a quarter to a third of all Americans at any
given point in time have some sort of incontinence problem,
not just this one, but if you start to understand
what the uh what what's behind it, it actually makes
a lot more sense. But basically, you have what's called
a um a. The floor of your pelvic muscle, your

(02:42):
pellic muscle or your pellc floor is basically what it is,
and that is what holds your guts and everything up.
That supports basically everything inside your abdomen, and it's it's
like a trampoline of muscle that all that stuff sits in,
and it has a few holes in it. It has
one or your urethra, one for your house and then

(03:03):
if you're a woman, has one for your vagina to
right um. So normally the that muscle is pretty tight
and it's holding all that stuff closed. And then when
you need to pee or your poop or something, your
brain is like, all right, open up, you're going number one,
You're going number two. Here comes a baby, that kind
of thing. And over time this muscle can kind of

(03:27):
get weaker, get looser. Once you have a child, that
can really stretch your muscles out. And so as a
result of this, it's harder to hold impea, especially if
you get a sudden urge to go. Yeah, and and
like you said, it. You know, as you age, this
can increase um. One of the reasons I think it
it primarily affects women, uh, is because childbirth and pregnancy

(03:51):
can play a pretty big role in this. And interestingly, uh,
that's the same as for C section as just a
good old fashioned vaginal birth. That's really weird. Yeah, because
I would think it has to do with with I
don't know, I guess section. I think there's pressure no

(04:12):
matter what during pregnancy. But it does say that childbirth,
even a C section, they're they're impacted. Well, yeah, then
it must just be for the whole um, the whole pregnancy,
just the baby sitting on that trampoline of muscle. It's
gotta stretch it out a little up and down for sure. Yeah,
it's like settled down there jr. All moms say, well,

(04:33):
they're pregnant, so pregnancy, childbirth age, Uh. Some other uh,
a little more serious causes, although they're not as common
as those are, like infection or bladder cancer, bladder stones
for men, prostate problems right, which I didn't. Did you

(04:53):
know what the prostate does? Do? I know what the
prostate does. That's my question that's out there on the table,
right now I do, but I don't know right now, Okay,
I'll tell you. You know at one so you know, semen,
I am sure well acquainted, all right. So you know,

(05:14):
like the sperm that's in semen, you know the other
stuff that's in semen that's made by your prostate, and
women have something to um called the skeins gland and
it makes up basically that for women. So semen minus
the sperm, so your prostrate and your skeins gland are

(05:37):
are um well male and female stuff makers, thank you.
So it's we're dancing around this one for sure. But
so um the prostate and I didn't see it anywhere,
but I would guess if the skeins gland is affected
to um, it could have an impact on incontinence for sure.
But also medicines, two different kinds of medications can make

(05:59):
you be yourself. Well yeah, and it's here's the thing too.
Like a lot of times they don't necessarily come in
and say it's this one thing that's causing it. So
a lot of researchers now think maybe it can be
a combination of things that it's not just the bladder. Yeah,
there's clearly a brain connection because you can. You can

(06:20):
tell your brain no, it's not time, settle down, and
your brain will be like, oh sorry, false alarm. Just
wait a little longer to your bladder. Unless you've crossed
that threshold, then there's no turning back. And then it's
just like, I wonder what that's all about, actually to
the threshold where you're like no, no, no, there is
no bringing bringing it back. I don't know, like I'm

(06:41):
about to pee my pants if I don't find a bathroom,
because really, other than you know, having to take a
shower afterwards, all your all your breaking is like decorum.
You know. Yeah. I think what it is is your
brains weighing the violation of decorum versus the horrible feeling
that is having endurance. Just like I'm going with this one,

(07:02):
so long decorum. But um, it is a it's a
it's enough of a an embarrassing problem that people do
seek treatment. But unfortunately, from what I understand and from
what the article that you sent um says is that
there's real, like low level attention paid to solving this.

(07:24):
But luckily there's kind of like this rising school of
thought that's like, no, we we need to study this more.
This is not enough. You can't just tell women to
go do kegel exercises and don't worry about it, or
that they have to wear poise pads for the rest
of their life. That's not a solution. That's not an answer.
So let's take a break and we'll come back and
talk about what you can do when you're about to

(07:44):
pee yourself, because you are opening your door alright, So

(08:15):
the bladder, I'm curious we should maybe do a full
one on the bladder at some point, because it's really
interesting to me. I've always been a person that I
feel like I p more than your average person. Me too.
You definitely do, but yours is for one reason. It's
because you have a constant flow of liquids coming into
your body. Not just liquids, but coffee too. Chuck Wich

(08:37):
is a diuretic. Yeah yeah. Emily also is a frequent urinator.
And I've always just suspected that, um that it's not
like people say I have a small bladder. I don't
know if that's true or not. Like I think it's
not so much the size of the bladder, but maybe
how it relates to the brain. That's kind of And

(09:00):
it seems to be the the The prevailing wisdom that's
developing now is that there's something going on with the
brain bladder connection. Yeah, so that's what happens when you
need to when everything's going great. The bladder sends a
signal to the brain and says, hey, brain, you might
want to find a might want to get this meat

(09:21):
bag to a toilet soon because I have to release
and it's going to happen at some point no matter what. Right.
There also seems to be possibly some connection to vassip pressing,
because the brain floods the um bladder with vasippressing um
to keep it from peeing while you're sleeping um as

(09:42):
a child, as you're developing, and um, you're not peeing
the bed any longer. It's because you're vassip pressing levels
are right rising throughout your lifetime. UM, and I wonder
if they start to go down after you age and
that actually has an an impact on it as well.
It's possible, chuck. Uh. So all right, your brain gets

(10:03):
this signal that your bladder says it's full. Um, if
you're if you're dude, you can run to the urinal,
which I would love to have one of this in
my house by the way, But Emily said, no way.
She was like, you live in a house full of women.
We're not building a urinal for you. Well, you're like,
we can have both one right next to each other.
So you run to the urnal and when you get there,

(10:25):
your your brain sends a signal back that says, all right,
we're here, release the urine. Or if you can't get
to a urinal or a bathroom, your brain says, sorry, bladder,
but you're gonna have to hang in there for a bit.
That's it. That's peeing, Yeah, pretty much. Do you remember

(10:45):
we talked about mix mixturition syncope and I call this syncope.
Know what was that? It's where you faint after you pee,
right right, because they think there's like changes in your
level of either vast oppressing or nor up and ne friend,
there's some chemical that tells your muscles to relax around
your bladder causes you to to faint. So what can

(11:09):
you do? You can do kegels. If you're a woman
or a man, um you can do you could basically,
I think from what I understand, the first thing you
want to do is go to your doctor and this
specialist his name was um Dr Philip P. Smith, and
he's one of these new thinkers about this kind of thing.
And he said, if your doctors tells you to do

(11:30):
kegels or get used to wearing pads, give yourself another doctor.
Go see somebody else, because there's other stuff you can do.
But if your doctor is worth you know, their salt,
they're gonna say things like, um, yes, do kegels. Try
to follow a basically a p regiment schedule. Yes. So
I didn't realize this and this this person had like

(11:52):
the greatest quote. Um, we have all heard that voiding
on a schedule rather than just when you have to
go is better. I never heard that had me there.
I think the specialist needs to get out of the
clinic once in a while. I remember when my dad
sat me down when I was ten and said, you
know it's on you pe at nine, noon, three, seven
and ten and everything will be great. That's supposedly what

(12:14):
you want to do is go every three hours, um,
whether you have the urge or not, and you're training
your body to be able to hold it. And then
paradoxically you want to hold it for an extra five minutes,
then maybe an extra ten minutes, because, as this article
says it not for the opposite, Stretching your bladder actually
allows it to hold more, so you'll have the urgency

(12:37):
less frequently over the day. But I don't know about
that one. I'm not I'm not banking on it. Did
you ever go to one of those dumb college bars
that had the thing where beer is free until you pee? No? Yeah,
it was a thing at some bars from like five
to seven. Beer was free for everybody until the first
person in the bar p That's a lot of stress,

(12:57):
and so of course there's always, you know, some stupid
frat boy peeing in a beer pitcher under the table
just so we can drink a little more. Where was this,
I mean, we both went to college in the same town.
I don't I don't think. I think they had them
at Georgia Southern. I never I never went to one
in Athens because I wouldn't have wanted that pressure, because
I would have been, like, I gotta be guys. Yeah

(13:19):
enough said with Georgia Southern. Yeah, so train your bladder.
If you have to pee, try and stave it off
even longer. Five minutes at a time, then maybe ten
minutes and before you know it. You get to that
front door and you're just fine, You're just gonna poop yourself,
which is a whole other short stuff episode. All tickets right, uh,
And that's it. If you want to get in touch

(13:39):
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